REGINALD HILL
A KILLING KINDNESS

A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1980

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Reginald Hill 1980

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN 9780586072516

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN 9780007370252

Version: 2015-06-18

Dedication

For Dan and Pat

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Epigraph

The man that lays his hand upon a woman,

Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch

Whom ’twere gross flattery to name a coward.

JOHN TOBIN: The Honeymoon

Chapter 1

… it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the few last bubbles, till through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon, and birds with wings wide as a windmill’s sails slowly drifting round it, and over the bank’s rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a current turns me over, and I drift, and still am drifting, and …

What the hell’s going on here! Stop it! This is sick …

Please. Oh God! Be careful you’ll …

Jack! No!

Ohhhh …

See! Look. The lights … please

… fakery … I don’t want

… lights! Mrs Stanhope, Mrs Stanhope, are you all right?

… auntie, are you OK? Please, auntie …

… thank you, love, I’m a bit … in a minute … did I get …

… vicious blackmailing cow and I’ll see …

‘… picking up lots of forget-me-nots. You make me …’

‘Sorry,’ said Sergeant Wield, switching off the pocket cassette recorder. ‘That was on the tape before.’

‘Pity. I thought she was proving that Sinatra really was dead,’ said Pascoe putting down the sergeant’s handwritten transcription of the first part of the recording. ‘Did you switch off there, or what?’

‘Or what, I think. I had the mike in my pocket, nice and inconspicuous. When I jumped up to grab at Sorby it must’ve fallen out and pulled the connection loose. I’m sorry about all this, sir!’

‘Oh no, you’re not,’ said Pascoe. ‘Not yet. When Mr Dalziel comes through that door with the Evening Post in his hand, that’s when you’re going to be sorry.’

Wield nodded gloomy agreement with the inspector, who now studied his report as if seeking some hidden meaning.

Like all Sergeant Wield’s reports, it was pellucid in its clarity.

Calling on Mrs Winifred Sorby in pursuit of enquiries into the murder of her daughter, Brenda, he had found her in the company of her neighbour, Mrs Annie Duxbury. A short time later, Mrs Rosetta Stanhope and her niece, Pauline, had turned up. Mrs Stanhope was known to the sergeant by reputation as a self-professed clairvoyant and medium. It emerged that Mrs Sorby wished Mrs Stanhope to attempt to get in touch with her dead daughter. The sergeant had been pressed to stay and take part. Agreeing, he had excused himself to go out to his car where he had a small cassette recorder. Concealing this under his jacket, he had returned and joined the women round a table in the dead girl’s darkened bedroom. After a while Mrs Stanhope had seemed to go into a trance and finally started talking in a voice completely different from her own. But only a few moments later the door had burst open and Mr Sorby, the dead girl’s father, had entered angrily and brought the seance to an end.

His fury at his wife’s stupidity had been redirected when he became aware of the sergeant’s presence. He had rapidly found a sympathetic ear for his complaints in the local press and by the time a chastened Wield had returned to the station, Pascoe had already fielded several enquiries about the police decision to use clairvoyance in the Sorby case.

‘His wife’s always gone in for that kind of stuff,’ explained Wield. ‘Sorby’s never approved. Naturally she wasn’t expecting him back for a couple of hours.’

‘Perhaps he’s got second sight,’ grunted Pascoe.

He was examining the transcript again. It had taken Wield nearly an hour of careful listening to sort out the confusion of overlapping voices.

‘Let’s get it straight,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mrs Stanhope in her trance voice. That’s clear. Then Sorby arrives and starts shouting. OK?’

‘Yes,’ said Wield. ‘Next – that’s “Please. Oh God,” etc., is the niece, Pauline. “Jack … no!” – that’s Mrs Sorby.’

‘And this great yell?’

‘Mrs Stanhope coming out of her trance. Then the niece again, Sorby going on about fakery, Mrs Sorby asking Mrs Stanhope if she’s all right.’

‘Which she is. Speaking in her normal voice again, right?’

‘Right. And Sorby again. The niece had jumped up and put the light on. Sorby pushed her aside and looked as if he was going to assault Mrs Stanhope. That’s when I got in on the act.’

‘And the rest is silence,’ said Pascoe. ‘That’s apt.’

‘I wish it had all been bloody silence,’ said Wield. He had one of the ugliest faces Pascoe had ever seen, the kind of ugliness which you didn’t get used to but were taken aback by even if you met him after only half an hour’s separation. The advantage of such an arrangement of features was that it normally blanked out tell-tale signs of emotion. But at the moment unease was printed clearly on the creased and leathery surface.

The phone rang.

It was the desk sergeant.

‘Mr Dalziel’s just come in,’ he said. ‘He’s on his way up.’

The door burst open as Pascoe replaced the receiver.

Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel stood there. A long intermittently observed diet had done something to keep his bulging flesh in check, but now anger seemed to have inflated him till his eyes threatened to pop out of his grizzled bladder of a head and his muscles seemed on the point of ripping apart the dog-tooth twill of his suit.

Like the Incredible Hulk about to emerge, thought Pascoe.

‘Hello, sir. Good meeting?’ he said, half rising. Wield was standing to attention as if rigor mortis had set in.

‘Champion, till I got off the train this end,’ said Dalziel, raising a huge right hand which was attempting to squeeze the printing ink out of a rolled up copy of the local paper.

He pretended to notice Wield for the first time, went close to him and put his mouth next to his ear.

‘Ah, Sergeant Wield,’ he murmured. ‘Any messages for me?’

‘No sir,’ said Wield. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Not even from the other bloody side!’ bellowed Dalziel. He looked as if he was about to thump the sergeant with the paper.

‘It’s all a mistake, sir,’ interposed Pascoe hastily.

‘Mistake? Certainly it’s a bloody mistake. I go down to Birmingham for a conference. Hello Andy, they all say. How’s that Choker of yours? they all say. Fine, I say. All under control, I say. That was the bloody mistake! You know what it says here in this rag?’

He unfolded the paper with some difficulty.

‘It has long been common practice among American police forces to call on the aid of clairvoyants when they are baffled,’ he read. ‘I leave a normal English CID unit doing its job. I come back and suddenly it’s the Mid-Yorkshire precinct and we’re baffled! No wonder Kojak’s bald.’

Pascoe risked a smile. Lots of things made Dalziel angry. Not having his jokes appreciated was one of them.

The fat man hooked a chair towards him with a size ten foot and sat down heavily.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

For answer, Pascoe shoved Wield’s report towards him.

He read it quickly.

‘Sergeant.’

‘Sir!’

‘Oh, stop standing there as if you’d crapped yourself,’ said Dalziel wearily.

‘Think I may have, sir,’ said Wield.

This tickled Dalziel’s fancy and he grinned and belched. There had obviously been a buffet bar on the train.

‘How’d it happen you had a recorder in your car, lad? Not normal issue these days, is it?’

‘No, sir,’ said Wield. ‘It’s my nephew’s. It’d gone wonky so I’d been having it repaired.’

‘That was kind of you,’ said Dalziel approvingly. ‘At an electrical shop, you mean?’

‘Not exactly, sir,’ said Wield, uncomfortable again. ‘It’s Percy Lowe who services the radio equipment in the cars. He’s very good with anything like this.’

‘Oh aye. In his own time and with his own gear, I suppose,’ said Dalziel sarcastically.

‘He did a good job on your electric kettle, sir,’ said Pascoe brightly.

Dalziel edged nearer the corner of the desk to scratch his paunch on the angle.

‘Let’s hear what the spirits had to say, then,’ he commanded.

He followed Wield’s transcript closely as the tape was played again.

‘Now that’s what I call helpful,’ he said when it was done. ‘That makes it all worthwhile. Here’s us thinking Brenda Sorby was killed after dark when all the time the sun was shining, and that she was chucked into our muddy old canal that’s so thick Judas bloody Iscariot could walk on it, and all the time it was some nice crystal-clear trout stream!’

‘Sir,’ said Pascoe, but the sarcasm wasn’t yet finished.

‘So all we’ve got to do now, sergeant, is work out the most likely nesting ground for albatrosses in Yorkshire. Or condors, maybe. Wasn’t there a pair seen sitting on a slag heap near Barnsley? That’s it! And these dark-skinned buggers’ll be Arthur Scargill and his lads just up from t’pit!’

Pascoe laughed, not so much at the ‘wit’ as in relief that Dalziel was talking himself back into a good mood. He had known the fat man for many years now and familiarity had bred a complex of emotions and attitudes not least among which was a healthy caution.

‘All right, Peter,’ said Dalziel. ‘This crap apart, what’s really happened today?’

‘Nothing much. House to house goes on, but we’re running out of houses.’

‘And the lad, what about the lad?’

‘Tommy Maggs? I saw him again today while the sergeant was at the Sorbys’. It was just about as useful. He sticks to his story. He’s very uptight, but you’d expect that.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police visiting him twice daily.’

‘Oh aye,’ said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at his watch. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said. ‘How’s your missus?’

Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, was five months gone with their first child.

‘Fine, she’s fine.’

‘Grand,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s what you need, Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you down a bit.’

He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.

‘So if she’s all right, and my watch is all right, the Black Bull’s open and I’ll let you buy me a pint.’

‘A pleasure, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘But just the one.’

‘Don’t be shy. You can buy me as many as you like,’ said Dalziel.

As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs and said, ‘You’d best come too, sergeant, in case we move on to spirits.’

He went chuckling through the door.

Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain and then followed him.

Chapter 2

Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less than four weeks.

The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty, a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town. Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators, Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car accident on an icy Scottish road.

This second tragedy almost destroyed Mrs Dinwoodie. She had left the Garden Centre in the care of her nurseryman and gone off alone. More than three months elapsed before she reappeared. She looked pale and ill but was clearly determined to get back to normality. Ironically it was her first tentative steps in that direction which completed the tragic trilogy.

While the Dinwoodies had made no close personal friends locally, they had not been inactive, their social life being centred on the Shafton Players, the village amateur dramatic group. Mary Dinwoodie had withdrawn completely after her husband’s death, but now, pressed by a kindly neighbour, she had agreed to attend the group’s annual summer ‘night out’. They had had a meal at the Cheshire Cheese, a pub with a small dining-room on the southern outskirts of town. At closing time they had drifted into the car park, calling cheerful goodnights. Mary Dinwoodie had insisted on coming in her own car in case she wanted to get away early. In the event she had stayed to the last and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. The other twenty or so revellers had all set off into the night, in groups no smaller than three. And all imagined Mary Dinwoodie was driving home too.

But in the morning her mini was still in the car park.

And a short time afterwards a farm labourer setting out to clear a ditch not fifty yards behind the Cheshire Cheese found her body neatly, almost religiously, laid out amid the dusty nettles.

She had been strangled, or ‘choked’ as the labourer informed any who would listen to him, a progressively diminishing number over the next few days.

But the alliteration appealed to Sammy Locke, news editor of the local Evening Post and ‘The Cheshire Cheese Choking’ was his lead story till public interest faded, a rapid enough process as the labourer could well avow.

Then ten days later the second killing took place. June McCarthy, nineteen, single, a shift worker at the Eden Park Canning Plant on the Avro Industrial Estate, was dropped early one Sunday morning at the end of Pump Road, a long curving street half way down which she lived with her widowed father. Her friends on the works bus never saw her alive again. A septuagenarian gardener called Dennis Ribble opening the shed on his Pump Street allotment at nine-thirty A.M. found her dead on the floor.

She too had been strangled. There were no signs of sexual interference. The body was neatly laid out, legs together, lolling tongue pushed back into the mouth, arms crossed on her breast and, a macabre touch, in her hands a small posy of mint sprigs whose fragrance filled the shed.

There were no obvious suspects. Her father was discovered still in bed and imagining his daughter was in hers. And her fiancé, a soldier from a local regiment, had returned to Northern Ireland the previous day after a week’s leave.

Sammy Locke at the Evening Post read the brief accounts in the national dailies on Monday, looked for an angle and finally composed a headline reading CHOKER AGAIN?

He had just done this when the phone rang. A man’s voice said without preamble, ‘I say, we will have no more marriages.’

Locke was not a literary man, but his secretary, having recently left boring school after one year of a boring ‘A’ level course, thought she recognized a reference to one of the two boring texts she had struggled through (the other had been Middlemarch).

‘That’s Hamlet,’ she announced. ‘I think.’

And she was right.

Act 3, Scene 1. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face and you make youselves another; you jig, you amble, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriages; those that married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.

Sammy Locke did not know his Shakespeare but he knew his news and after a little thought he removed the question mark from his headline and rang up Dalziel with whom he had a drinking acquaintance.

Daziel received the information blankly and then consulted Pascoe, whose possession of a second-class honours degree in social science had won him the semi-ironical status of cultural consultant to the fat man. Pascoe shrugged and made an entry in the log book.

And then came Brenda Sorby.

She was just turned eighteen, a pretty girl with long blonde hair who worked as a teller in a suburban branch of the Northern Bank. A picture had emerged of a young woman with the kind of simplistic view of life which is productive of both great naïveté and great resolution. She had told her mother that she would not be home for tea that Thursday evening, and she had been right. After work she was having her hair done, and then she planned to take advantage of the new policy of Thursday night late closing by some of the city centre stores to do some shopping before meeting her boy-friend.

This was Thomas Arthur Maggs, Tommy to his friends, aged twenty, a motor mechanic by trade and an amiable but rather feckless youth by nature. He had got into a bit of trouble as a juvenile, but nothing serious and nothing since. Brenda’s father disapproved of almost everything about Tommy and his circle of friends, but was restrained from being too violent in his opposition by Mrs Sorby, who opined that it was best to let these things run their course. They did, until the night of Brenda’s eighteenth birthday which she celebrated with a party of friends at the town’s most pulsating disco. She returned home happy, slightly merry and wearing a rather flashy engagement ring. Jack Sorby exploded – at Brenda for her stupidity, at Tommy for his duplicity, at his wife for her ill-counsel, at himself for taking heed of it. He subsided only when his threats to throw his daughter out were met by the calm response that in that case she would start living with Tommy that very night.

A truce was agreed, a very ill-defined truce but one which Jack Sorby felt had been treacherously and unilaterally shattered when on that Friday morning only four days later he rose to discover his daughter had not come home the previous night. Once again, all Mrs Sorby’s powers of restraint were called upon to prevent him setting off for the Maggses’ household only a mile away and administering to Tommy the lower-middle-class Yorkshireman’s equivalent of a horsewhipping. Curiously, his genuine if rather over-intense concern for his daughter did not admit any explanation of her absence other than the sexual.

Winifred Sorby had a broader view of her daughter, however. As soon as her husband had left for the local rating office where he was head clerk, she had rung the bank. Brenda was usually there by eight-thirty. She had not yet appeared. At nine, she tried again. Then, putting on a raincoat because, despite the promise of a fine summer day, she was beginning to feel a deep internal chill, she went round to Tommy Maggs’s house.

There was no reply, no sign of life.

The Maggses all worked, a helpful neighbour told her. And, yes, she had seen them all go off at their usual time, Tommy included.

Mrs Sorby went to the police.

The name of Tommy Maggs immediately roused some interest.

At eleven-fifteen the previous night a Panda car crew had been attracted by the sight of an old rainbow-striped mini with its bonnet up and a young man apparently trying to beat the engine into submission with a spanner.

Investigation revealed that it was indeed his own car which had broken down and, despite all his professional ministrations (for it was Tommy Maggs), refused to start. A strong smell of drink prompted the officers to ask how Tommy had spent the evening. With his girl-friend, he told them. She, irritated by the breakdown and being only half a mile or so from her home which was where they’d been heading, had set off on foot.

Had they been in a pub?

No, assured Tommy. No, they definitely hadn’t been in a pub.

But you have been drinking, suggested one of the policemen emerging from the interior of the mini with an almost empty bottle of Scotch in his hand.

A breathalyser test put it beyond all doubt. Tommy was taken to the station for a blood test. His protestations that he had not taken a drink until after the breakdown evoked the kindly meant suggestion that he should save it for the judge. The police doctor was occupied elsewhere looking at a night watchman who’d had his head banged in the course of a break-in and it was well after one A.M. before Tommy was released, a delay which was later to stand him in good stead. By this time it was raining heavily and constabulary kindness was once more evidenced by a lift in a patrol car going in the general direction of his home.

When the police approached him the next day at the Wheatsheaf Garage, his place of work, he assumed it was on the same business and his story came out again – perhaps a little more rounded this time. A quiet romantic drive with his fiancée, the breakdown, Brenda’s departure on foot, his own frustration and the taking of a quick pull on the bottle to soothe his troubled nerves prior to abandoning the useless bloody car and walking home.

When he realized the true nature of their enquiries, however, his agitation was intense. The police took a statement, then went on to the bank. No one had heard of or seen Brenda since she left the previous evening, but there had been a couple of attempts to get her on the telephone earlier that morning, apart from Mrs Sorby’s, that was.

By lunch-time, the police were taking things very seriously. Jack Sorby had created a diversion by going round to the Wheatsheaf Garage and attempting to assault Tommy who by this time was too miserable and demoralized to defend himself. Fortunately, the police arrived almost simultaneously and established peace. Tommy wasn’t up to much except repeating his story mechanically but at least they solved the mystery of the other phone calls. He had made them, he admitted. When asked why, he said with a brief flash of his customary liveliness, ‘To get her to back up my fucking story about the drink, of course.’

This made sense to Pascoe, who since the two stranglings had been told by Dalziel to keep an eye on all female attacks or disappearances. While it didn’t actually confirm Tommy’s version of the evening, it helped a lot; or it meant he was ten times more cunning than he looked.

What finally took Tommy off the hook was the last thing anybody wanted – the discovery of the body. It was not pleasant. Right through the heart of the city, a straight line alongside the shallow and meandering river, ran the old canal, a relict of the last century and little used since the war until the holiday companies began to sell the delights of inland cruising in the ’sixties and commercial interests began to react to soaring fuel costs in the ’seventies. It was a barge that quite literally brought Brenda’s body to light. Riding low with a cargo of castings, the barge was holding the centre of the channel when a careless cruiser forced it over towards the bank. The bargee swore with proverbial force as the bottom bumped and the propeller stuttered, thinking he’d caught some sizeable bit of rubbish dumped in the murky waters.

Switching off the engine he hurried to the stern and peered over. At first he was just aware that the dark brown water was imbued with a richer stain. Then as he saw what came drifting slowly to the surface, he began to swear again but this time as a kind of pious defence.

The pathologist was able to confirm that all the mutilations on the body were caused by the action of the propeller and had nothing to do with the girl’s death. She had been strangled but had not been dead, though possibly moribund, when she entered the water. Asked when death occurred, he refused to be more definite than not less than twelve, not more than twenty hours. Pressed, he became irritable and talked about special circumstances such as the high temperature of the canal water and the opening up of the chest and lungs by the propeller. Pascoe, long used to the imprecisions of science, had looked for other evidence of timing.

Twenty hours took him back to six-thirty P.M. on the Thursday. He was able to move forward to eight P.M. because that was when Brenda and Tommy had met. Their rendezous had been at the Bay Tree Inn, a half-timbered former coaching inn not far from the city centre which had fallen into the hands of a large brewery group renowned for the acuteness of their commercial instincts and the awfulness of their keg beer. Now the Bay Tree’s history attracted the tourist set, its twin restaurants (one expensive, one extortionate) attracted the dining set, and its cellar disco attracted the young set. Thus it was always packed. The meeting had been witnessed by Ron Ludlam, a workmate of Tommy’s and one of the friends of whom Mr Sorby so fervently disapproved. He had been drinking with Tommy while he waited for Brenda. Brenda had not wanted to stay at the Bay Tree. Ron Ludlam who had accompanied the distraught Tommy home after the news of Brenda’s death, said she seemed more interested in having a serious talk with her fiancé about marital matters. Alone. They had gone off in the noisy, multicoloured mini.

According to Tommy they had spent the evening just driving around. Without stopping? Of course they had stopped, just parked out in the country to have a fag and a talk. Was that all? They might have played around a bit but nothing serious.

‘Nothing serious’ was confirmed by the pathologist. Brenda was virgo intacta.

The canal was flanked on the one side by warehouses. Access could be obtained to the waterfront, but only by dint of climbing over security gates. In addition, from eleven P.M. on, there had been great police activity in Sunnybank, the canyon-like road which serviced the warehouses, for it was in one of these that the night watchman, whose injuries had kept the doctor from sampling Tommy Maggs’s blood, had been attacked.

On the other side of the canal, the side where the body had been found, was a grassy isthmus planted with willows and birches to screen the industrial terrace from the view of those taking the air in the pleasant open spaces of Charter Park. This air on the night in question was filled with music and merriment. The city’s fortnight-long High Fair was coming to the end of its first week there. The City Fathers in a fit of almost continental abandon permitted the municipal Boating Station to stay open until midnight during the fair and those who tired of the roundabouts and sideshows could hire rowboats to take them across to the isthmus where the trees were strung with fairy lights and a couple of hot-dog stands provided the wherewithal for a picnic. This area was far too well populated for a body to have been dumped in the canal until eleven-thirty when the clouds which had slowly been building up in the south suddenly came rolling northwards, ate up the moon and the stars, and spat rich, heavy raindrops into the sultry night. Within twenty minutes the isthmus was vacated by laughing holiday-makers and cursing hot-dog men alike, while on the canal the pleasure cruisers had either puttered off to more congenial moorings downstream or battened down for the night.

Now a regiment of corpses could have been deposited without drawing much attention.

But by now, Tommy Maggs was already in deep conversation with the police and was to continue in their company until dropped at his door at one-thirty A.M. His father, watching a late western on the telly, confirmed his arrival. So unless he later stole from the house and, carless, contrived to re-encounter Brenda, lure her to the canal bank some five miles away and there murder her, he was in the clear.

But what had happened to Brenda after she left her boy-friend by his broken-down mini, no one could say. Except one person.

At six o’clock on Friday the news editor of the Evening Post picked up his phone.

‘I must be cruel, only to be kind,’ said a voice.

The line went dead.

The news editor yelled for his secretary.

Chapter 3

Ellie Pascoe was not enjoying the rich rewarding experience of pregnancy.

At roughly the halfway point she was still suffering the morning sickness which should have died away a month earlier and was already experiencing the backache and heartburn which might decently have waited till a month later.

‘For Christ’s sake don’t make soothing noises,’ she said as she returned pale-faced to the breakfast table. ‘I’m having a baby, not turning into one.’

Pascoe, warned, returned to his cornflakes and said lightly, ‘You shouldn’t have bought the ticket if you didn’t want the trip.’

‘I didn’t know it meant the end of civilization as I know it,’ she said grimly.

‘At least you don’t have to go to work,’ said Pascoe.

They were well into July and the long vacation had begun at the college where Ellie lectured.

‘It’s the students who get the holiday, not us,’ she retorted. This was an ancient tract of disputed land, full of shell holes. Pascoe made a tactical withdrawal.

‘Can I have the butter, please?’

‘If by that you mean that if I’d taken your advice and resigned last term I wouldn’t need to be thinking about next September’s courses then let me remind you that, first, I personally need the work and, secondly, we personally need the money and, thirdly, that women having fought for centuries to get the meagre rights they’ve got, including the right not to lose their jobs because some careless fellow puts them up the stick, I am not about to renounce those rights just because you’re feeling all patriarchal and protective. Excuse me.’

When she came back, Pascoe said, ‘Thank God I didn’t ask for the marmalade,’ but she didn’t respond.

‘What are you doing today?’ he asked as he finished his coffee.

‘I’m going to be sick at the Aero Club,’ she said.

‘Good God,’ he said, alarmed. ‘You’re not taking up gliding, are you?’

‘No. Just having lunch there. They do a chicken-in-the-basket. Today they might see it there twice.’

‘Come on,’ said Pascoe. ‘It can’t be that bad. Can it? And why the Aero Club? Not your normal stamping ground.’

‘I’m meeting Thelma.’

‘Lacewing? You surprise me. I shouldn’t have thought it was her scene either.’

‘And what do you know about Thelma’s scene?’

‘Me? Nothing. Nothing at all,’ said Pascoe uninterestedly.

He had good reason for sounding uninterested in Thelma Lacewing. First she was the leading light of WRAG, the Women’s Rights Action Group which put the law a very poor second to its principles; secondly, he had recently helped to put her uncle, a respected local businessman, away on a pornography charge; thirdly, he (in a purely aesthetic sense of course) rather fancied her and sometimes thought she might rather fancy him.

‘Anyway, her scene or not, it’s her idea,’ continued Ellie. ‘I promised that when the summer vac came and I had more time, I’d take some of the secretarial work off Lorraine Wildgoose’s plate.’

‘But you said it was only students who got holidays,’ protested Pascoe.

‘Oh, go to work!’ said Ellie disgustedly. ‘See if you can stop that lunatic from killing more than half a dozen women today.’

As he finished his toast, he said crumbily, ‘Wildgoose. That rings a little bell. Do I know her?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ellie. ‘Though she’s all the things you admire in a woman. Forty, ferocious, teaches French and is in the middle of a rather unpleasant marital shipwreck.’

Pascoe shuddered and rose from the table.

When he returned with his briefcase ready for departure, Ellie was immersed in the newspaper.

‘Hey, there’s a little bit here about fat Andy calling in a clairvoyant.’

‘Oh God. Let me see.’

He looked at the paper and said in relief. ‘It’s just a couple of lines and I don’t think he gets the Guardian anyway.’

‘Perhaps not. But just think how large it’s likely to be printed in the tabloids! It’s a good story. At least, you made it sound like a good story last night.’

‘Don’t!’ he said, kissing her.

‘Peter,’ she said thoughtfully when he’d finished, ‘that transcript of the tape you showed me. Can I borrow it?’

‘Why on earth should you want that?’

‘Well, it’s just come back to me. I woke up in the night and I was lying there thinking and I got this brilliant idea, you know how you do. About that woman in the trance. Well, I know you said it can’t have anything to do with what actually happened, but I was remembering, last year the museum organized a dig in Charter Park, do you remember, at the bottom end beyond the War Memorial. Our historians were involved. It was the Roman Level they were interested in, but they took one section of the trench much deeper just to see. It was clear there’d been a settlement thereabouts for as long as men have been settling.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Pascoe. ‘So what?’

‘So suppose when you die, time shifts? Well, why not? It certainly stops, doesn’t it? Briefly for a moment as she dies, she goes back. You know they say your life flashes before you as you drown? So, it’s a cliché, but it’s what people who’ve been saved from drowning have said. Suppose it’s not just your life but the whole of life. And once you’re beyond yours, you’re beyond the point of being saved.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pascoe, disturbed by what for Ellie was an untypical flight of fantasy. ‘So …?’

‘So for a moment, that girl is out of our time and into, say, the early Mesolithic period. The water runs clear. And because of the time shift, it’s still daylight. And those faces, what did she say, “like beasts at their watering,” small wary brown-skinned people, Cresswellians perhaps, or some tribe of prehistoric man. And the birds she saw, pterodactyls perhaps.’

‘Jesus!’ said Pascoe.

‘All right. Be dismissive. But it seems to me that this famous open mind you’re always yapping about is about as open as a bank on Saturday.’

‘I was merely expressing surprise at the depth of your knowledge of prehistory,’ he protested speciously.

She looked sheepish.

‘I know about as much as you,’ she admitted. ‘That’s why I wanted the transcript. Thelma was in on the dig, it’s one of her hobbies. I thought she might be able to put me right.’

‘A lady of many parts, that one,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mainly untouched by human hand, or so she would have us believe.’

‘What on earth can you mean?’ she said, grinning.

‘All right,’ he said, opening his briefcase. ‘Here it is. We’ve got a copy at the station, but don’t lose it all the same. Though strictly speaking, it’s hardly an official document! And in return, promise me you won’t let those viragos con you into taking on more than you can cope with. OK?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

He kissed her again, sternly, and left.

But as he backed out of the drive he suddenly thought pterodactyls! and chuckled so much he almost hit the milkman.

Nevertheless something of what Ellie had said must have tickled his subconscious, for when he found himself crawling in the nine o’clock traffic which seemed likely to stretch all the way to ten, almost without taking a conscious decision he turned down a side street and ten minutes later found himself driving through the gates of Charter Park.

The dry weather had baked the ground so hard that even the odd thunderstorm hadn’t softened it and the turf was very little cut up so far. But it was well worn and strewn with litter like the route of a Blind School paperchase. Pascoe wondered how long the fair would survive. It had changed considerably even in the comparatively few years he had known it.

Up until the First World War it had been one of the great horse-fairs. There were still people who could recall the days when drovers and gypsies came from all over the North and the roadsides for miles on the approaches to the town were lined with caravans, not the sleek, shining motorized caravans of today, but the old wooden ones, gold and green and red and blue. Gradually during the century, its character had changed in the direction of a pure pleasure fair, but horses had still been sold as recently as the early ’sixties. But there had been growing complaints, not least from the regular fairground people who considered themselves several cuts above the Romanys and objected to their presence on all kinds of grounds, notably their hygienic deficiencies, both human and equine. The Showman’s Guild added its weight to the protests and when a small herd of gypsy ponies broke loose from the Park and trotted through the centre of town, causing several accidents and much indignation, horses were finally banned from Charter Park. There was still a small gypsy presence at the Fair, but the main gypsy encampment was now on a stretch of the old airfield to the south and most of their business was done door-to-door rather than at the fairground.

So pleasure had won the day, but even the taste for pleasure changes and fairs are limited in the ways they can keep up with these changes. Also, though in the past this had traditionally been the city’s holiday fortnight, and many people still stuck to the habit, many more objected to being told when they should or should not go on holiday. Another decade, thought Pascoe, and the High Fair could well be another casualty in the war for individual rights.

But at the moment it still covered a great deal of ground. Quiet now, though there was plenty of movement in the caravan park, his mind peopled it with the milling crowds of a hot summer’s night. After ten-thirty when the pubs closed, there would have been a new influx of noisy and not very perceptive pleasure-seekers. Easy for one girl, or one couple, to pass unnoticed here. But how had Brenda Sorby got here in the first place?

Pascoe walked slowly over the fairground, deep in thought. One possibility was that the girl had met someone she knew on the way home last Thursday night and accepted an invitation to go to the fair. But it was after eleven P.M., so he would have needed to be very persuasive. Perhaps she had simply been offered a lift home and it wasn’t till the car was moving that the Fair had been mentioned. By the time they got here, the storm would have broken, the crowds be heading for home. But that still left the fair people who would be clearing up, mopping up, counting up for another hour or so. So had she just sat in the car for that time? Perhaps she was already dead or unconscious? Perhaps …

He was walking past a fortune-teller’s tent and the sight of it made him think of Sergeant Wield’s experience the previous day. He had recounted it jokingly to Ellie when he got home but she had not been amused. It strikes me you can do with all the help you can get, she had said. She seemed to be taking these murders very personally. Perhaps an emotional side effect of her condition? He had had more sense than to say so!

He reached the small landing-stage where the hire-boats were moored.

Joe, the boatman, was not there yet for which Pascoe was grateful. He was the kind of surly suspicious Yorkshireman who at birth probably examined his mother’s breast closely for several minutes before accepting the offer. But at least he made a definite witness.

No, he didn’t recognize the photo of Brenda Sorby. No, there was no boat unaccounted for. No, there was no one who had come back alone.

Forced to admit that the sudden storm had brought the boaters back in a bit of a rush, he grudgingly conceded that a foursome might have come back as a threesome. But no singles, and he’d seen ’em all. Rain or no rain, he checked the gear in each boat before refunding the two pound deposit; and all deposits had been returned.

But the Choker must have used a boat. The nearest bridge giving access to the isthmus was a mile downstream, too far to risk carrying a body. In any case, why come so far to dump it?

The only alternative was that the Choker was one of the barge people, a theory approved by Andy Dalziel who tended to lump all people who lived itinerant lives together as ‘dirty gyppos’. Pascoe, however, had done a paper at university on the education of ‘travelling children’ in England and knew that the attitudes and lifestyles of the different societies varied considerably. Fairground and circus folk, for instance, were generally speaking much concerned about their children’s schooling, and where they could afford it, often sent them to private boarding-schools. Gypsies on the other hand were much more suspicious of ‘the system’, and much more conscious of their independence from it, a consciousness which made integration of their children into any conventional school much more difficult. The barge people in the same way had once presented an even greater problem, but one which had been in part solved by time and the disappearance of their way of life as canal traffic ceased to be economically viable. There were signs of a resurgence recently and no doubt, thought Pascoe, the problem too would return.

Meanwhile he had ensured that everyone in any kind of craft on the canal that night was traced and interviewed. All had been in company, all reasonably alibied, none had heard anything. In any case the signs were that the girl had been put into the water from the bank, not a boat. There were traces of mud on her dress corresponding to that in a shallow groove in the bank close by the place where the body was found.

Pascoe glanced at his watch. Brooding time over, he decided. There was work to be done. He began to retrace his steps.

The fairground was livelier now. Business wouldn’t really get under way till much later in the morning, but meantime there were things to be done, machinery to be checked and oiled, canvas covers removed, brass to be polished. At side-stalls like the rifle-range and the hoopla there were the gimcrack prizes to be set out, gun-sights to check in case they had deviated to accuracy, and hoopla rings in case they had stretched to go over the whisky bottle.

By the fortune-teller’s tent a young woman in jeans and a yellow suntop was talking to a man in a tartan shirt and brown cords, gaitered militarily above ex-army boots. He was about forty with the knitted brow and dark craggy good looks of a Heathcliff.

They looked at Pascoe as he passed and the man said something.

A moment later Pascoe stopped and turned as the woman’s voice called, ‘Excuse me!’ She had started after him. The man watched for a moment and then strode away towards the trailer park.

‘Aren’t you one of the policemen?’ said the girl. Anyone under twenty-five now qualified as a girl, Pascoe realized ruefully. This one certainly did; fresh young skin, clear brown eyes, luxuriant auburn hair escaping from the green and white spotted bandanna which she had tied around it.

‘That’s right,’ said Pascoe. ‘Does it stand out?’

‘I saw you the other day, I think,’ said the girl, evading the question. Pascoe nodded. It was likely. He had spent a great deal of time here on Friday afternoon.

‘You work here?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you have a moment?’

Without waiting for his answer she set off towards the fortune-teller’s tent and lifted the flap.

Pascoe paused before the entrance, partly to establish his independent spirit, partly to read the sign. Madame Rashid, it said, Interpreter of the Stars, Admission 50p. The lettering was pseudo-Arabic and the words were surrounded by a constellation of varying hues and shapes.

‘The price of the future’s gone up,’ he said.

‘You should try having a full horoscope cast,’ she said seriously. ‘Besides, we’re not allowed to tell the future.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Oh, of course you would. Won’t you come in?’

He passed by her under the flap.

It was a bit of a disappointment, reminding him more of a Boy Scout camp than the Eastern pavilion he had half expected. The smell was of damp canvas and trodden grass and the only furniture was a plain trestle table and two folding chairs.

A suitcase lay on the table and she pointed to this as if sensing his disappointment and said, ‘It looks better when I get the props out.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Pascoe. ‘What did you want to see me about Miss-er-Rashid?’

She laughed, very attractively.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m Pauline Stanhope.’

She held out her hand. He took it. The name sounded familiar.

‘And I’m Detective-Inspector Pascoe,’ he said.

‘I thought you must be. It’s about yesterday, Inspector Pascoe. Won’t you sit down?’

He unfolded the chairs and they sat opposite each other at the table, as though for an interrogation. Or a fortune-telling. It depended on your point of view.

‘Yesterday?’

Yes. Aunt Rose was very upset when she read the paper.’

‘Was she?’ said Pascoe.

Aunt Rose? Of course, Rosetta Stanhope. And this was the niece.

‘Rosetta. Rashid,’ he murmured as the enlightenment spread.

‘That’s right. I’m sorry. I thought you’d know all about us. All those questions.’

‘Think of all those answers, Miss Stanhope,’ he said sadly. ‘Someone has to edit.’

Everyone who worked on the fairground had been questioned, naturally. Everyone who admitted visiting it on Thursday night also. Everyone who lived on the same street as the Sorbys. And the next street. And maybe the next. Everyone who worked with her. Everyone who lived on the streets she would have walked through on her way home from the broken-down car. Everyone who had a barge or a cruiser or a craft of any kind which could have been anywhere on that stretch of the canal that night.

The questioning was still going on, was likely to continue till Christmas. Or the next murder.

‘My sergeant seemed to have heard of your aunt,’ he said cautiously. ‘But he didn’t mention any connection with the Fair.’

‘Mr Wield, you mean. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he? It’s a bit complicated, I suppose. Family history usually is.’

‘Perhaps you could give me a digest, if you think it would be helpful, and if you don’t have to stray much beyond the Norman Conquest,’ said Pascoe.

She grinned.

‘I see where Mr Wield gets his cheek from,’ she said. ‘The thing to understand is that originally Aunt Rose is a Lee on her father’s side, a Petulengro on her mother’s.’

‘You mean the Romany families?’

‘You know something about gypsies?’

‘I’ve read my George Borrow,’ he said with a smile.

‘An expert!’ she said. ‘That must be very useful when it comes to moving them on.’

Pascoe raised his eyebrows and the girl had the grace to look a little embarrassed before carrying on.

It emerged that years earlier, Rosetta Lee, then nineteen, had met, loved and married ex-sergeant Herbert Stanhope, just demobbed from the Yorkshire Rifles and, after five years spent risking his life to protect the old folk at home, not in any mood to take heed of their melancholy warnings. The couple married and lived happily and childlessly until twelve years later when Stanhope’s younger sister turned up pregnant and husbandless and not at all contrite. But she effaced her sin in the best nineteenth-century manner by dying in childbirth, leaving the Stanhopes with Pauline on their hands. Thereafter they lived even more happily for another twelve years till an accident at the railway marshalling yard where Stanhope worked killed him.

‘Aunt Rose knew it was going to happen,’ said Pauline.

‘Why didn’t she stop him going to work?’ enquired Pascoe, trying not to sound ironic.

‘If you know it, then essentially it’s already happened so you can’t possibly stop it,’ said Pauline as if she were talking sense.

‘And you? Do you have this – er – gift too?’

‘Oh no!’ she said, shocked. ‘I’m a fully qualified horoscopist and a pretty fair palmist but I’ve got no real psychic powers. Aunt Rose is different. She’s always had the real gift. Her grandmother was a chovihani, that’s a sort of gypsy witch. She really looked the part, not like Aunt Rose. But Aunt Rose has got the greater gift. She’s a true psychic, that’s the fascinating thing. It’s not just a question of fortune-telling, but she really makes contact. Well, you know that yourself from the other day.’

Pascoe nodded, looking as convinced as he was able.

The girl continued, ‘It was strange how it developed in a gorgio society. Perhaps all the trappings and superstition of Romany life are a limiting factor, you know, they make a little go a long way but stop a lot from going as far as it might. That was what one of the researchers from the Psychic Research Society said.’

‘Your aunt is famous, then?’

‘Oh no!’ said the girl, ‘But she’s well known in interested circles. Really all she wants is a quiet life, but she’d always been willing to help friends out.’

‘For free?’

‘At first. But inflation nibbled away at the pension Uncle Bert left her and she’d had to charge fees to make both ends meet. But she’s very careful in accepting clients.’

Gullibility being high on her list of criteria? wondered Pascoe.

‘Normally she’d have steered clear of a case like Mrs Sorby’s, but Mrs Sorby had been coming to her for years, ever since her mother died. Mr Sorby objected but she still kept coming. Naturally when this awful thing happened, Aunt Rose had to help.’

‘Naturally. What’s your part in all this, Miss Stanhope?’

The girl shrugged.

‘I had an office job, but it was pretty deadly. I’d picked up a lot of things from Aunt Rose, she brought me up, you see. Well, I’m not Romany, so I didn’t have anything of her gift, but I got quite interested in casting horoscopes. It’s pretty scientific that, you only need a very limited degree of sensitivity. Palmistry the same. I got myself properly qualified and gave up the office to work at it full time alongside Aunt Rose. But it’s her I want to talk about, Inspector. That awful newspaper story really upset her.’

Pascoe looked surprised. The Evening Post had been fairly restrained, he thought.

‘It didn’t much please my superintendent either,’ he said.

‘Aunt Rose doesn’t mind helping the police, but this makes her sound like a real sensationalist,’ said the girl, producing a newspaper.

The mystery was solved. This was not the Evening Post but that morning’s edition of one of the more lurid national tabloids. Obviously one of the local reporters was a stringer for this rag and knew that provincial standards had very little selling power. Pascoe glanced through the article. Its main source was Mrs Duxbury, the neighbour. She gave a graphic account of what Mrs Stanhope had said before being awoken from her trance. Embellished by Fleet Street licence, the occasion sounded like something out of Dennis Wheatley. Much play was made of the fact that Rosetta Stanhope was also Madame Rashid (Mrs Duxbury again?), fortune-telling in the very fairground where Brenda had been murdered. Not even a perhaps, thought Pascoe. He wondered if Dalziel had seen it yet.

‘Auntie was really upset this morning,’ continued the girl. ‘Too upset to work, so I’ll be on by myself all day.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Pascoe conciliatingly.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ she flashed. ‘It’s not that. It’s Auntie’s reputation. You may be the police but you’ve no right to exploit her name like this.’

‘Reputation?’ said Pascoe, beginning to feel a little irritated. ‘Surely you’re rating all this stuff a little bit high, aren’t you, Miss Stanhope? I mean, that sign outside! Isn’t this just the bottom end of the entertainment business?’

He didn’t want to sound sneering and the effort must have shown for the girl was equally and as obviously restrained in her reply.

‘Aunt Rose is Romany. She’s never turned her back on that all these years she’s lived among gorgios. This used to be mainly a Romany Fair, Inspector. Now what with one thing and another, the only gypsy presence you get here is a couple of tatty stalls and a bit of cheap labour round the fringes. Dave Lee, for instance, his grandfather …’

‘Who’s Dave Lee?’ interrupted Pascoe.

‘I was just talking to him,’ said the girl ‘I suppose he’s a kind of cousin of Aunt Rose’s. His grandfather might have brought two, three dozen horses here, being a big man. Now he helps around the dodgems while his wife sells pegs and bits of lace. He’s not allowed to bring the ponies he still runs anywhere near the park! This tent is the last real link between the fair today and what it used to be for centuries. There was a fortune-teller’s tent on this pitch before there was a police force, Inspector. Not even the big show-people with their roundabouts dare interfere with that. And for nearly fifty years it was run by Aunt Rose’s grandmother. When she died four years ago, that looked like the end. Oh, there were fakes enough who might have taken over, but the Lees have more pride than that. So Aunt Rose stepped in. For a couple of weeks a year she’s back in the family tradition, in the old world.’

‘And which world are you in, Miss Stanhope?’ asked Pascoe.

‘I help as I can,’ she said. ‘Collect the money, look after the props, do a bit of palm-reading when Auntie needs a rest. Yes, I did say props. It wasn’t a slip, so don’t look so smug. Of course most people come into a fortune-teller’s tent at a fairground for the entertainment. But we take it seriously, that’s the important thing.’

She spoke defiantly. Pascoe answered seriously, ‘I hope so, Miss Stanhope. You spoke of protecting your aunt from exploitation just now. I too am employed to stop people being exploited.’

She flushed angrily and said, ‘Auntie was just concerned to bring any comfort she could to that poor woman. We shut up shop here for the afternoon, which lost us money, and Aunt Rose wouldn’t accept any fee from Mrs Sorby. So we’re the only losers, wouldn’t you say, Inspector?’

‘There are all kinds of gain, Miss Stanhope,’ said Pascoe provocatively. ‘I mean in the entertainment world, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there?’

Now she was really angry.

‘Tell me, Inspector,’ she said in a hard, clear voice, ‘I’d say you were a bit younger than Sergeant Wield, right?’

‘A bit,’ he admitted.

‘And yet he is so much pleasanter than you. It looks to me as if the nastier you are in the police force, the higher you’re likely to get. Right? I bet I’m right. Goodbye, Inspector!’

Wait till you meet my boss, thought Pascoe as he left. You don’t know how right you are!

As he drove away he saw in his rear-view mirror the man Dave heading back towards the tent.

Keen for a report on the conversation? he wondered.

But wasn’t everybody fascinated by a connection with a murder case?

He put it out of his mind and hurried towards the station, eager to tell Sergeant Wield he’d got an admirer.

Chapter 4

Alistair Mulgan sipped his tomato juice carefully. He would have preferred a large gin partly because he wasn’t paying and partly because his metabolism seemed to be very sympathetically inclined towards large gins these days. But the Northern Bank did not care to have its staff breathing alcohol over its customers and since becoming acting manager of the Greenhill branch after the manager fell under a bus (nothing to do with alcohol of course) three weeks earlier, Mulgan had determined to set a perfect example. Now nearly forty, he had come a long way from his humble beginnings in rural Derbyshire, but for the past few years had felt that his career was bogged down. Each full week as acting manager had given him hope that the appointment would be made permanent, hope reinforced when clients started inviting him out to lunch. Though even here fate, as usual, had distributed its gifts with grudging hand and instead of the looked-for filet mignon at the White Rose Grill, he had just been offered the choice between chicken-in-the-basket and scampi-in-the-basket at the Aero Club bar.

‘First time here, Mulgan?’ said his host. ‘How d’you like it?’

Mulgan looked round. A group of young men were drinking pints and noisily exchanging gliding experiences. Three women were sitting in a corner beneath a fluorescent notice announcing that Friday and Saturday were disco nights. On the blue emulsioned walls a formation of china Spitfires banked through photographs of smiling young men in flying kit towards an old school clock whose face was ringed in RAF colours. The hands, propeller-shaped, stood at twelve-fifteen.

‘It’s very nice,’ said Mulgan politely.

‘Yes, I thought we’d meet here. It’s handy for us both and I hate them stuck-up places with their fancy prices. Besides, I’m going up a bit later on, so I’d have to be here anyway. You ever tried it, Mulgan?’

His host was Bernard Middlefield who with his brother John was co-owner and dictator of a small electrical assembly plant on the Avro Industrial Estate. Middlefield Electric was feeling the pinch of the latest credit squeeze and Mulgan guessed that these new friendly overtures in his direction were just so much bread scattered on the waters. He was not offended. Middlefield under his abrupt, loud-mouthed manner was a sharp enough operator. Chicken-in-the-basket today meant that he had been spotted as being possibly worth filet mignon tomorrow. That was one thing about these Yorkshiremen. You knew precisely where you were with most of them.

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Mulgan. ‘What kind of plane do you fly?’

‘Plane? Not a plane, Mulgan. Do you never look up from that desk of yours? It’s gliders we fly here. Though planes have been known to land, isn’t that right, Austin? Alistair Mulgan. This is Austin Greenall, our CFI, that’s Chief Flying Instructor, secretary, and master of all trades.’

‘As you see,’ said the man who had taken the place of the middle-aged woman who had been behind the bar to start with. ‘Except cooking. We’re short-handed today. Summer flu, would you believe! Jenny has to keep an eye on the kitchen too, so if there’s anything else you require from the bar, I’m your man.’

‘No, thanks. These’ll do us. I’m flying and Mr Mulgan’s got to keep his head clear else he’ll get his sums wrong at the bank.’

‘I thought I recognized you,’ said Greenall. ‘The Club account’s there.’

‘Watch him,’ said Middlefield to Mulgan. ‘He’ll be wanting to screw some money out of you for another couple of planes if he can.’

‘The Club does own some planes already, then?’ said Mulgan.

‘A plane. We’ve got a Cub we use for towing but it’s long past its best. And there’s a Cherokee owned by a consortium of local businessmen, Mr Middlefield included. No, it’s the gliding that keeps us going. Just.’

‘But not if you have your way, eh, Austin? He’s only been here five minutes and he’s got ambitions to turn us into Heathrow.’

‘Hardly. I just think there’s a lot that can be done to improve facilities and attract members.’

‘As long as you keep in mind it’s not like Surrey up here. We know what we like and we like value for money. How’s our grub coming on? Take a look, there’s a good chap.’

Greenall smiled amiably and left the bar.

In the corner Ellie Pascoe said to Thelma Lacewing, ‘Why doesn’t your secretary hit him with a bottle?’

‘Middlefield’s on the committee, also a JP,’ said Thelma. ‘But mainly he’s a reactionary shit. For instance, trying to get the weekend discos stopped on the grounds that they breed immorality. I keep a very close eye on that sod, I tell you.’

The two women made a striking contrast. Ellie was long-limbed, mobile, though the taut line of her athletic figure was now slackened by the contours of pregnancy; black-haired, grey-eyed, and with a face that after thirty-odd years was handsome rather than pretty, and her chin gave promises of determination her character kept. Thelma’s face had the frank wide-eyed pensive beauty that goes with folded wings and flowing white robes and that a monk might dream of without sin. She was a dental hygienist.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ she said. ‘Ellie, are you going to sink cow-like into the placid, man-pleasing, expectant-mother role, or are you going to cut your brain off from your belly and start doing some real work for WRAG?’

‘Depends what you mean by real work,’ said Ellie.

The third woman spoke. This was Lorraine Wildgoose, teacher of French at a local comprehensive school. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and intense eyes. Her hair was at fag end of an old freak-out cut and her figure had the kind of thinness that derives from nerves rather than diets.

‘Vacancies in all areas,’ she said. ‘Typing, telephoning, tea-making.’

‘Propagandizing, preaching, protesting,’ murmured Thelma.

‘Not to mention subverting, suborning, and sabotaging,’ added Lorraine.

‘I rather fancied assailing, assaulting, and assassinating,’ said Ellie, not to be outdone. ‘But seriously, look, I want to help, but also I want some time to write. I’m into another novel. I’ve finally got over my feelings of failure with the first. I mean twenty-two publishers can’t be wrong! And I really want to get this new one sorted out before this.’

She patted her stomach disgustedly.

‘We’ve all got calls on our time,’ flashed Lorraine. ‘Two kids, a pending divorce and an unbalanced husband takes a bit more of your time than a couple of neatly turned paragraphs.’

This unexpected outburst brought a hiatus in the conversation which was filled by the timely arrival of Greenall with their baskets of food. At the bar the discussion seemed to be getting a little heated too.

‘Well, you know your own employees best, I dare say,’ Middlefield was saying. ‘But give me leave to know something too. When you’ve been on the bench a bit, you get to read between the lines. I mean, just look at the facts. A field behind a pub! A shed on an allotment! The canal bank! Not the kind of places you’d look to meet the vicar’s wife, are they?’

‘I can assure you, Brenda Sorby was as nice and decent a young woman as you could hope to meet,’ protested Mulgan, his rather fleshy face pinking with indignation or embarrassment.

‘That’s how they all seem,’ scoffed Middlefield. ‘You see a bit more of the world in my line than yours, I dare say.’

‘You’re not saying those poor women deserved what happened to them?’

‘Don’t be daft! But them as take chances can’t complain overmuch when things go wrong.’

‘Those women certainly can’t complain, can they?’ said Thelma in a clear, carrying voice.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Middlefield turning on his stool to view her. ‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Lacewing.’

‘I’ll just fetch the tartare sauce,’ murmured Greenall. He retreated to the kitchen.

‘I suppose you might say that unaccompanied women coming to places like this take the chance of overhearing primitive sexist prejudices being expressed by loud, ill-informed men,’ continued Thelma.

‘I expect I know as much about it as you, young woman,’ said Middlefield grimly.

‘Really? Perhaps we ought to put the police in touch with you, then. Fortunately one of my friends is married to one of the officers on the case. Ellie, perhaps you’ll pass the word to your husband that Mr Middlefield knows more than he has yet been willing to volunteer.’

Ellie smiled warily. There weren’t many people left in the world who could embarrass her, but Thelma was certainly one of them. Which was probably why, as Peter had theorized, she allowed her the moral ascendancy.

Greenall had emerged from the kitchen with two more baskets which he placed before the two men at the bar, saying blithely, ‘Here you are. Piping hot.’

Thelma turned back to her friends, completely unruffled. That’s what I envy too, thought Ellie. I get all pink and abusive.

‘Is your husband really on the case?’ asked Lorraine Wildgoose.

Ellie nodded.

‘Are they getting anywhere?’ pursued the woman rather intensely.

‘I’m not sure. I expect so,’ said Ellie cautiously.

Lorraine Wildgoose looked as if she might be going to say something more and Ellie’s heart sank at the prospect of having to listen to an attack on the police, no matter which of the many possible forms it took. But Thelma, as if spotting the danger, said lightly, ‘What about all this clairvoyant help?’

‘You read about that?’ said Ellie, relieved. ‘Listen, I’ve got a theory. I pinched a transcript of what this woman actually said from Peter. It might interest you in your archaeological hat.’

She produced the transcript and was holding forth when Greenall returned with the tartare sauce.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, putting the sauce on the sheet of paper in front of Thelma.

‘Don’t do that, Austin!’ she said. ‘You may offend the spirits.’

‘You’re doing a bit of table rapping, are you?’ he said. ‘Be careful. It’s Mr Middlefield you don’t want to offend!’

‘It’s OK. This is police business,’ said Thelma. ‘My friend is a Mrs Detective-Inspector. These are official documents.’

Greenall picked up the transcript and pretended to rub it with his sleeve, murmuring at the same time, ‘By the by, Middlefield’s threatening to drop in at the disco on Friday on a fact-finding tour.’

‘Is he? I may join him. Thanks, Austin. Join us for a drink later?’

‘I’d love to, but another time. I’ve got things to do and his lordship’s got to be launched after lunch. Per ardua ad astra, as they say.’

He left and Ellie fluttered her eyebrows at Thelma.

‘Now he seems nice, Thelma.’

‘He’s bearable,’ she said noncommittally. ‘When he came six months ago I thought Christ, another ex-RAF wizard-show chauvinist pig. But he was a nice surprise. I think he’s got genuine sympathy with the feminist position.’

‘I bet,’ grinned Ellie.

‘That, if I may say so, is the kind of crack that comes from too close an association with the racist, sexist constabulary.’

‘Is that so? And perhaps you’ll now explain how you come to be rolling around with evident pleasure in this male chauvinist sty,’ said Ellie.

‘Why, to overcome my fear of flying, of course,’ said Thelma, wide eyes wider with surprise. ‘Now let’s eat. Ellie, you’ve nearly finished your drink. Would you like something else? A quart of warm milk, perhaps.’

Ellie giggled girlishly.

‘You’ll think I’m silly,’ she said coyly. ‘But being like this and all, I get these funny urges, you know how we mothers-to-be are, and whenever I eat scampi and get put down at the same time, I’ve just got to have a couple of glasses of Dom Perignon. It brings up the wind so nicely!’

Chapter 5

Andy Dalziel, according to much of his acquaintance, had a very simplistic approach to life. He saw everything as either black or dark blue. In this they were mistaken. Life was richly coloured for the fat man; full of villainy and vice, it was true, but with shifting shades and burning pigments, like Hogarthian scenes painted by Renoir.

Pascoe understood this. ‘He detects with his balls,’ he had once told Ellie gloomily.

To Pascoe’s rational mind, there was still some doubt whether Brenda Sorby’s murder was truly in sequence with the other two strangulations.

‘She wasn’t laid out like the other two,’ he said. ‘In fact the body was hidden, whereas with the others, the killer obviously wanted it to be found. Also, to let herself be picked up at that time of night (and there had to be a car – she wasn’t going to walk five miles to the canal!), it had to be someone she knew.’

Dalziel wasn’t much interested. He knew it was part of the sequence. But he didn’t mind exploding a younger colleague.

‘Mebbe she just scrambled away and fell in. He wouldn’t be about to jump in after her, would he? Or mebbe he left her for dead, all neatly laid out, and she recovered enough to roll over. Splash! Or mebbe he was disturbed and just slipped her over the edge, not wanting her to be found while he was still so close in the vicinity. And as for the car, mebbe he pulled her into it, threatened her with a knife, even knocked her out. Or mebbe it was someone she’d trust without knowing him, a copper, say. What were you doing that night, Peter?’

Laughter (Dalziel’s). End of discussion.

Curiously, the one thing which seemed to confirm the superintendent’s judgement that Brenda’s death was linked with the others, he had treated most dismissively.

‘Anyone can make a phone call,’ he said. ‘And everyone’s got a Complete Shakespeare. I’ve got a Complete Shakespeare!’

Pascoe sat in his office and studied the pathologist’s reports which he knew almost off by heart. All three women had been strangled by someone using both hands. The bruising on their necks indicated this and the cartilage in the area of the voice boxes was fractured to a degree which demonstrated the violence and strength of the attack. But the pathologist was adamant that Brenda Sorby had not been quite dead when she went into the water … all over me, choking, the water, all boiling at first, and roaring, and seething … Pascoe shook the medium’s taped words out of his mind and went on with his reading.

There was a degree of lividity down the left side which was unusual for a corpse taken from the water, but it could be explained by the fact that the body seemed to have been wedged in the debris by the canal bank rather than rolling free in the current. Also (another difference from the previous cases) there was some bruising around and underneath the breasts, possibly indicating a sexual assault, though the lacerations caused by the barge propeller had made examination difficult in this area. Elsewhere there was no indication of sexual interference.

Pascoe sighed. The bloody pathologist thought he was having things difficult!

Sergeant Wield came in.

‘I just had CRO run some of those fairground people through the computer,’ he announced.

‘Including Miss Stanhope?’ said Pascoe with a grin.

Wield’s creased and pitted face had shown no response to Pascoe’s twitting about Pauline Stanhope’s interest earlier that day. Now he managed something not unlike a grimace.

‘There was a statement from her and her aunt,’ he said. ‘Like all the rest. Nothing. This was interesting, though.’

David Lee had been in the hands of the police several times. Disorderly conduct had cost him half a dozen fines. In 1974 he had been put on probation for assault on his common law wife. Assaulting a council officer in charge of an operation to move on a gypsy encampment got him three months in 1976, and this had been doubled in 1978 when he punched a police officer who was attempting to stop him from beating another common law wife.

There was also a charge of rape in 1979, dismissed by a majority verdict.

‘What made you pick on this one?’ wondered Pascoe. ‘Not because I saw him chatting up Miss Pauline, I hope?’

‘There’s half a dozen others,’ grunted Wield. ‘If you’d care to have a look.’

Pascoe thought for a moment.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘If Mrs Sorby’s such an enthusiast for peering over the Great Divide, perhaps Brenda got roped in too.’

‘And might have known about the Madame Rashid connection,’ said Wield.

‘And met Dave Lee through it?’

Pascoe shook his head even as he spoke.

‘It’s stretching things a bit,’ he said. ‘Still, it’s worth checking. Fancy a trip to the fairground to have your fortune told?’

Wield shrugged.

‘I go where I’m sent,’ he said indifferently.

‘All right,’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s twelve now. Have your lunch, then with your vigour fully restored go and cross the lady’s palm with silver. Either lady, depending whether you prefer mutton or lamb.’

I must stop this nudge-nudge, wink-wink bit, he thought as Wield left. I’m getting more like Dalziel every day!

A few moments later the phone rang. It was the desk sergeant.

‘There’s a lady here wants a word with someone in CID, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a Mrs Rosetta Stanhope.’

‘What? Oh, look, Sergeant Wield probably wants to speak with her anyway, so let him sort it out, will you? He should be on his way out any moment now.’

‘He just went past, sir. I don’t think he noticed the lady. He seemed in a bit of a hurry.’

‘The bastard!’ swore Pascoe. ‘He’s opted for lamb. All right. Wheel her in.’

Rosetta Stanhope had adapted well to her chosen environment. In her late fifties, her hair tightly permed with just the suggestion of a blue rinse, dressed in a stylishly cut grey suit with toning shoes and handbag, she could have chaired a WI meeting or opened a flower show without remark. Only a certain rather exotic stateliness of bearing and darkness of skin which even a carefully layered mask of make-up could not disguise hinted at her origins.

Her voice was quiet, a little hoarse, perhaps; the result of twisting her vocal cords to produce her spirit voices? wondered Pascoe.

‘I met your niece this morning,’ said Pascoe. ‘You haven’t seen her?’

The woman considered, then smiled.

‘You’re quite right, Mr Pascoe. I wouldn’t do Madame Rashid dressed like this. And I wouldn’t go home specially to change just to impress a policeman.’

Pascoe was impressed. She’d cut right to the source of his question. Not that you needed to be a mind-reader, but it was a good policeman’s trick.

‘So you’ve left your niece in charge of the future?’

Lucky old Wield.

‘I didn’t feel able today,’ she said. ‘I don’t put on a show. It’s got to be right.’

‘What about Pauline?’

Mrs Stanhope made an entirely un-English moue of dismissal.

‘Palmistry,’ she said. ‘It’s a craft. You learn it.’

Pascoe decided to do a bit of short-cutting himself.

‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get an apology out of us, Mrs Stanhope. It wasn’t our doing. A denial perhaps, but I tried that yesterday and you saw the report. I’m sorry it upset you.’

‘I’m not upset, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Don’t heed our Pauline. She probably told you I’m not very practical? Well, I’m practical enough to let her think so. She needs to be looking after folks, that one. It probably comes of never knowing her mother.’

‘You brought her up from birth, I believe,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’m surprised she doesn’t regard you as her mother.’

‘She did when she was young, poor mite. But she had to be told. I remember she was twelve and casting her own horoscope. It wouldn’t come right. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Bert and me had always decided to tell her. It was a relief in a way.’

‘Why so?’

‘She knew about me and my background. I’m proud of it, why not? And Bert always used to joke that he’d stolen me from the gypsies. Pauline and me, we got very close, but I could see it was a bit difficult for a young lass thinking she’d got a gypsy mother but not feeling of the blood, if you follow. It were odd, but when we told her, it seemed to bring us even closer together.’

‘And finally she joined that side of the family business?’

‘She could hardly become an engine-driver, could she, even in this age,’ said Rosetta Stanhope lightly.

‘I believe it’s possible,’ said Pascoe, suddenly picturing Thelma Lacewing wiping her brow with an oily rag on the footplate of the ‘Flying Scotsman’. ‘But tell me, Mrs Stanhope, if you’re not here to complain, threaten, or cast a gypsy’s curse, why have you come?’

She leaned forward and tapped his desk significantly. Or perhaps she was knocking on wood?

‘I was upset last night, Inspector. Not by the paper, though that irritated me. I was upset by the contact I’d made with that poor girl. I hardly slept. I just kept on getting impressions; no, not visions or words, nothing definite like that; but, like colours and feelings. I let Pauline think it was just the newspaper report that had upset me. I wanted to think things out for myself.’

‘So what do you want, Mrs Stanhope?’

She opened her youthfully clear brown eyes in big surprise.

‘I want to do what that Evening Post said I was doing already,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to help you with your enquiries.’

Chapter 6

When Sergeant Wield reached Charter Park the fairground was doing good business. It was a fine sunny day with just enough breeze to cool a fevered brow and send little puffs of cloud, picturesque to the point of artificiality, drifting across the deep blue cyclorama above. The green of the grass and trees, the sparkling band of the river, the bright brash music of the steam organ, all these combined to produce a pleasantly euphoric sensation in the sergeant’s breast which he allowed to surface in the form of a light almost soundless whistle through gently pursed lips.

His reaction when he reached the fortune-teller’s tent and found the flap closed and a folding chair pushed against it to which was pinned a card saying BACK SOON was disappointment, but it was a purely professional emotion. Pascoe’s winks and nods about Pauline Stanhope’s fancy for him were seeds on the stoniest of ground. Wield’s self-containment and reticence were not linked, as the amateur psychologist might have guessed, to his fearsome appearance. They derived from his early recognition that the best way to conceal one thing was to conceal all things, to have so many secrets that the only important one would not be suspected. And this was that he was wholly and uncompromisingly homosexual. In the police, the usual circular syndrome applied. Homosexuals were disapproved of because they were blackmail risks because they were secretive because they were disapproved of …

Ten years earlier Wield had found himself growing increasingly fond of a man called Maurice Eaton, a Post Office executive who was even more anxious than Wield about the damage an open liaison might do to his career. But they had reached the stage of discussing setting up house together in Yorkshire when Eaton was offered a promotion in the North-East. To Wield, the move had seemed tragic at the time, but soon a routine of weekends in Newcastle and holidays abroad had been established which, while it was not without its tensions and dangers, had proved viable for a decade. But though having the centre of his emotional life a hundred miles away had made him ‘safe’, it also made him a bit of a cypher. Institutions do not like what they do not understand and now he was stuck at sergeant with younger men like Pascoe leapfrogging over his head.

Eventually something would give, he felt it in his bones. Meanwhile, on with the job.

The stall closest to the fortune-telling tent was an old fashioned ‘penny-roll’ at which coins were rolled down grooved ramps to land on a numbered chequer board, winning the amount stated if the coin fell plumb in the middle of a square. The man in charge shrugged indifferently, but his sharp-featured helpmeet believed she had seen Pauline leave about twenty minutes earlier. So BACK SOON could mean an hour or so yet.

He ought to get back to the station. He felt a little guilty at the way he had turned a blind eye to Rosetta Stanhope as he left, but it had seemed amusing to reinforce Pascoe’s impression that he was more concerned with the good-looking niece than the old aunt. But it was very pleasant being out in the sunshine and he found himself asking the penny-roll woman if she knew where he might find Dave Lee.

She gave him a sharp, inquisitive look, then said, ‘He could be on the dodgems, or the waltzer. He helps around when they’re busy.’

‘He doesn’t have anything of his own then? A stall, I mean?’

The woman answered sneeringly, ‘He’s pure didicoi, not real fair people, don’t like regular work, them. There is a stall, a lot of gypsy tat if you ask me. Over there, by the river. You’re a copper, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m his rich uncle from Australia,’ said Wield gravely.

The dodgems and the waltzer producing no sign of Lee, he made his way to the stall which did nothing to make him feel the penny-roll woman had been unjust. Even in this temple of tawdriness, this looked extra tawdry and the dark-skinned woman with high, aristocratic cheekbones, one of which was livid with a wide bruise, seemed to be making little effort to entice customers.

‘I’m looking for Dave Lee,’ said Wield.

‘What for? Are you going to arrest the bastard?’ she answered.

‘Just talk.’

‘Pity. Why not put him in jail for a while?’

She seemed sincere.

‘Why? What’s he done?’

‘Him? What hasn’t he?’

Suddenly she seemed to tire of the conversation as if even resentment and hatred could not stimulate her interest for long.

‘He’s not here,’ she said flatly.

‘Where might he be?’

She shrugged. Wield consulted his notebook.

‘You don’t have a trailer here, do you? Could he have gone back to the encampment?’

Another shrug. Wield’s patience began to go.

‘All right. Come on.’

‘Come on where?’

‘To the station.’

‘Me? What have I done?’

The interest had been restimulated.

‘You? What haven’t you?’ mimicked Wield.

She swore. He didn’t understand Romany, but he had no doubt what she was calling him.

‘He went in the van,’ she said, gesticulating at the nearby trailer park. ‘Half an hour. To the camp, perhaps. Does he tell me where he goes? If you see him tell him he can …’

‘What?’ asked Wield.

The woman’s face went sullen, flat, once more. Only the bruise gleamed.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

Wield strolled down to the river’s edge. Boats were in large demand and the isthmus was full of people. For two days as a couple of dozen coppers crawled on their hands and knees from one end to the other, it had been closed to the public. The only result had been the most efficient litter-clearing operation in the city’s history. Now the picnickers were back, their appetites doubtless whetted by the thought that on this very spot perhaps a girl had been done to death. And if they got bored with that, they could stroll a hundred yards or so down the canal bank and peer greedily across at the blank wall of Spinks’ Electrical Depository where earlier the same night a watchman had had his skull fractured for the sake of a few cheap transistor radios made in Hong Kong.

Though typically he kept them to himself, Wield had his own carefully worked out ideas about crime and punishment. They included doling out in exactly measured and scientifically monitored doses the kind of pain to the attacker which he had inflicted on the attacked. Nothing to do with barbarities like chopping off hands or cutting off ears. Just the pain.

Though how to measure the pain of terror which these murdered women must have felt, he did not know. But something was needed, something better than we had.

He went back to Madame Rashid’s tent. The notice was still there. He glanced at his watch. One-thirty. The station? Or could he justify going after Dave Lee? It was just a fifteen-minute drive at the most.

‘Sod it,’ he said and headed for his car.

He drove rapidly and efficiently, roughly following the course of the river out of town till he reached the old airfield which lay to the southeast. There had been a time in the affluent days of Super-Mac at the end of the ’fifties when it had teetered on the edge of development into a full-scale airport. But the moment had passed and now it was two-thirds disused, the remaining one-third being in the hands of the local Aero Club. Occasionally small private planes landed, particularly when there was a big race meeting at the city track, but generally speaking only the breathless swoosh of the gliders disturbed the air. There were a couple up now. Wield watched them, admired their soaring freedom but felt no desire to share it. He was a motor-bike man himself. Black leather and 100 mph up the motorway. Something else he kept quiet about at the station.

The disused section of the airport, where the urgent weeds and grasses had turned the runway into crazy paving and a couple of derelict buildings gaped like dead mouths at the unremembering sky, was now the site of an unofficial/official gypsy encampment.

It was ‘unofficial’ because the local council had been arguing for years about the need to provide an official site in the area; it was ‘official’ because during the hard months of the winter and during the two weeks of the High Fair the council and the police operated a ‘no-hassle’ policy. But come the spring and come the end of fair fortnight, the stand-pipes were turned off and the travelling folk invited to travel. There was a strong lobby in the gliding club which wanted them cleared off permanently, claiming that apart from polluting the nearby river with their sewage, their ponies (the same which had been banned from Charter Park) were a menace to gliders and small aircraft landing only a quarter-mile away. The council had erected a picket fence to prevent the ponies from straying but this was not proving one hundred per cent effective, as Wield realized when he got out of his car close to the gaudily painted caravans.

Normally the arrival of a stranger would have been viewed with close suspicious interest, but at this moment all attention was focused on a noisy and potentially violent confrontation taking place in the middle of the caravan circle.

On the one side was a group of gypsies with Dave Lee at their head. On the other were two men, one slight, blond, wirily built, in slacks and a sports shirt, the other much bulkier and sweating in a thick windcheater and flying helmet. All around them at a discreet distance stood a circle of interested women and kids.

The heavier man was wagging a finger that wouldn’t take much bending to make a fist in Lee’s face.

‘Listen, you,’ he grated in a harsh Yorkshire accent, ‘I see one more bloody pony on the Aero Club’s ground and I’ll shoot it, you hear? And then I’ll come and shoot the bugger who owns it.’

Dave Lee bared brown-stained teeth in a sneer and answered in an unpunctuated and rather high-pitched gabble. ‘Listen mister what’s up here you come here fucking threatening and talking about some pony which pony show us the fucking pony and what do you think anyway that ponies have no fucking sense to get out of the way of those machines more fucking sense than some fucking idiots who go up in them!’

The wagging finger folded. Wield had recognized the face beneath the flying helmet. It was Bernard Middlefield, JP. Not a man he cared for, but not a bad magistrate from a police point of view. At least he jumped hard on first offenders, believed police evidence like Holy Writ, and started from the useful premise that ninety per cent of what most social workers said was crap.

It would be interesting but not diplomatic to witness him thumping the gypsy. The blond man seemed bent on acting as a peacemaker but there was no guarantee of his success.

Wield advanced, warrant card at the ready, and addressed himself to Lee.

‘Mr Lee?’ he said. ‘Can I have a word?’

The big gypsy laughed scornfully and said in the direction of Middlefield, ‘No wonder he wants to fight when already he’s called the cops!’

‘Are you the police?’ said Middlefield. ‘Just in the nick!’

Wield didn’t want to get involved but he had to hear the tale. The blond man was Austin Greenall, Chief Flying Instructor of the Aero Club. He had been manning the launching winch to get Middlefield’s glider airborne when a pony had come wandering across the path of the accelerating aircraft and nearly caused an accident. Middlefield had come straight to the gypsy encampment closely attended by the secretary.

‘Ultimately it’s the council that are responsible, sir,’ said Wield. ‘They own all this land. You lease from them, I believe? So keeping fences in repair is their job.’

‘Thanks for nothing,’ said Middlefield. ‘If I’d got killed, you might have taken heed, is that it? Well, I’ll tell you something, these buggers need sorting out, and I’m the man to do it. They’re anti-social, dirty and dishonest. I’ve got my works on the estate not a quarter-mile from here. When this site’s occupied, I double my security staff. Double it. And that costs brass!’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Wield. ‘Unless there’s been a breach of the law …’

Middlefield snorted indignantly, turned on his heel and marched away. Greenall gave an apologetic shrug to Wield, said, ‘For God’s sake, Mr Lee, watch those animals of yours,’ and went after him.

‘Yorkshiremen!’ said Lee. ‘Tough buggers, they think. Always wanting to fight.’

‘Not me,’ said Wield. ‘I want to talk.’

They went to sit in the sergeant’s car. Gypsies don’t invite strangers, especially policemen, readily into their caravans and though the day was balmy, Wield knew that if he talked with Lee out of doors, he would quickly inherit the circle of curious kids.

Away from the excitement of confrontation, the gypsy’s torrential speaking style declined to a reluctant dribble.

‘It’s about last Thursday night,’ said Wield.

‘I’ve told all that.’

‘I read what you said,’ said Wield.

‘Well then.’

‘You said you were at the Fair from eight till eleven, mainly on the dodgems.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t see anyone resembling the dead girl during that time.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You don’t sleep at Charter Park, do you?’

‘No. They stopped the ponies a few years back. Said they were dangerous. Like that short-arse fool.’

‘So you came back here to your caravan at night. How?’

‘I’ve a van. That’s it there. Licensed and insured.’

‘I never suggested it wasn’t,’ said Wield. ‘But I’ll check. I’ve done a lot of checking on you already, Mr Lee.’

‘So?’

‘So I know all about you. You’ve a nasty temper.’

The man shrugged.

‘Against women too. I saw a woman today at your stall. She’d had a nasty crack.’

‘She’s a clumsy bitch.’

‘Yes. Rape too. You’ve not stopped short of that, have you?’

This at last restarted the torrent of words, but not English. Wield said finally, ‘Shut up or I’ll pull your balls off.’

The man subsided, then burst out again. ‘There wasn’t no rape! No conviction! Rape that slut? Stick feathers on a chicken!’

‘All right, all right,’ said Wield impatiently. ‘Where was your van parked?’

‘Behind the stall,’ he answered sullenly.

‘And you just drove back here? Straight back? At eleven?’

‘Eleven, half past. I don’t know. It started raining. We packed the stuff from the stall into the van like every night.’

‘We?’

‘My wife and me. You met her you said. Then back here.’

‘And no doubt she’ll confirm this? And that you then went to bed and slept peacefully all night?’

The man didn’t bother to answer.

‘All right,’ said Wield. ‘Now tell me about Madame Rashid.’

He had a sense at that moment of the gypsy’s receptivity being turned up a notch, though there was no outer physical sign.

‘You know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘In fact she’s a relation of yours, isn’t that so?’

‘She married a gorgio,’ he said. ‘Many years ago.’

‘And her niece. You know her too?’

‘I see her at the park.’

Wield paused. He’d no idea why he’d introduced this line of questioning. It wasn’t going anywhere.

He decided on the heavily significant abrupt conclusion.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’

‘What?’

‘Out.’

The big gypsy got out of the car and shut the door with a force that shook Wield. An older grey-haired man with a ruddy open face who had been hanging around close by approached Lee and exchanged words with him in rapid Romany. Wield leaned out of his window and beckoned to the newcomer.

‘Who’re you?’ he demanded.

‘Me, pal? I’m Silvester. Silvester Herne’s my name, pal.’

‘Are you the boss of this lot? The king or whatever you call it?’

‘Me, pal?’ he said again, looking amazed. ‘Just an old gypsy, just old Silvester.’

‘Well, old Silvester, see if you can get it into your friend’s thick skull. I’m not happy about him. I’ll be back. Meanwhile, get that fence mended, stop them ponies straying. Or you’ll all be in trouble. Right?’

‘Right, pal,’ said Herne, beaming co-operation. ‘Straightaway!’

That was telling them! thought Wield as he drove away, but years of experience had taught him that telling gypsies anything was like talking to the trees. Not that he objected to gypsies as such, though the untidiness of their life made him shudder. If anything, he felt a sneaking sympathy with them as outcasts and envy of them as defiant outcasts. And perhaps there was some atavistic fear in his attitude also. He had certainly been more affected by Rosetta Stanhope’s trance yesterday than he cared to reveal.

He should have gone back to the station but instead he found himself driving to his own flat, where he made himself a cup of tea. It was a gloomy place, he thought dejectedly. Even on the brightest of days the small north-facing windows let little light in. And it was drab and impersonal. Not many people visited him here apart from his married sister and the young nephew whose cassette recorder he had used at the seance. But the secretive element in his make-up drew him to the anonymous and noncommittal in all but the most private areas of life.

Reacting against the thought, he picked up his phone and dialled Maurice’s business number in Newcastle. But when the phone was answered he replaced it without speaking. They had an agreement. All contact to be private except in extreme emergency. This was no emergency though somehow it felt as if there might be an emergency in the offing, like an area of low pressure over the Atlantic on the telly weather chart.

When he finally drank his tea it was quite cold and he saw with dismay that he had been sitting totally abstracted for more than an hour. It was after three-thirty.

He left the flat hurriedly. Pascoe was going to want to know how he’d spent his time. He would not be pleased. As for Dalziel …

At least he ought to be able to say he’d spoken to Pauline Stanhope.

He drove back to Charter Park, but swore under his breath when he saw the chair with the BACK SOON sign still outside Madame Rashid’s tent. What the hell did SOON mean to a fortune-teller?

It ought to mean something.

Suddenly uneasy, he pushed the chair aside and opened the flap.

It was dark inside, dark and musty. The triangle of light from the opening fell across a plain trestle table.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Wield.

He took two steps forward. Looked down. Retreated. As he pulled the flap down and replaced the chair with the sign a pair of young girls approached. One said boldly while the other giggled, ‘Are you the fortune-teller, mister?’

‘No,’ said Wield. ‘She’s gone.’

‘When will she be back?’

He gestured at the sign, then hurried away towards his car to radio for assistance.

BACK SOON. But from where?

Across the trestle table, her legs dangling off one end but her arms neatly crossed over her breast, lay the body of Pauline Stanhope.

She had been strangled.

Chapter 7

‘Not a good advert, this,’ said Dalziel. ‘Like a butcher getting food poison.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe, though his more exact mind found the analogy imprecise and therefore dissatisfying. He didn’t say so, but wondered what the newspapers might make of a murder in a fortune-teller’s tent.

The press were imminent, of course. The discovery of a crime by an experienced officer gives the police a head start in getting their investigation under way free from public or professional interference. But once they start, the news speeds like a run on the pound even from sites much more sequestered than a busy fairground. A rope barrier had been erected around the tent to keep the public back. The police doctor had examined the body briefly, pronounced the girl dead, probable cause strangulation, probable time two to four hours earlier. Next, at Pascoe’s suggestion, because of the smallness of the internal area, a single detective had been sent in on hands and knees, armed with a high-powered torch and a plastic bag, to pick over every inch of the floor space before the photographer and fingerprint men further trampled the already well crushed grass. Another couple of men were put to examining the turf in the environs of the tent, but the passage of so many feet there made it a token gesture.

Next, photographs were taken from all angles, sketches made, distances measured. Then the fingerprint boys, who had been dusting the chair and notice outside, moved in and did the chair and table inside with the body still in situ. Finally, after Dalziel had stood and looked phlegmatically at the corpse for a few minutes, he gave the order for it to be slid into its plastic bag and taken to the mortuary where the clothes would be carefully removed and despatched to the lab for examination.

Now the print men did the rest of the table before it and the chairs were also packaged and despatched to the lab.

While all this was going on, a police caravan had been towed into the car park and here already statements were being taken for the second time in a week from the fairground people, with particular attention paid to those whose stalls or entertainments were within sighting distance of the tent.

Of these, the sharp-faced woman on the penny-roll stall was the most positive. Her name was Ena Cooper.

‘Just before twelve she went. I told the ugly fellow. No, I didn’t speak, well, she weren’t all that close, like, and we was busy. Things don’t really pick up while afternoon, but you get a lot of kids round late morning and the roll stalls are always popular with the kids. No, I didn’t see her come back, I went across to our Ethel’s, she’s got a hot-dog stand by the Wheel, for a bite to eat later on, so she could have come back then. About two o’clock, just after the ugly fellow was here the first time. I was away mebbe forty-five minutes. No, it’s no use asking him. He’s so short-sighted he can hardly see the pennies. Kids cheat him rotten when I’m not here!’

Cooper, her husband, nodded melancholy agreement. He’d seen nowt, heard nowt.

Loudspeaker appeals were made to the crowd requesting anyone who had visited Madame Rashid’s tent earlier that day to come forward, but so far without success.

Notable by his absence was Dave Lee. After Wield had described his encounter that afternoon, he was sent to pick the gypsy up and bring him in for questioning. At the same time, Dalziel sent a man round to the Wheatsheaf Garage to check the movements of Tommy Maggs.

Pascoe nodded approvingly. Investigation is ninety per cent elimination. In his mind, Maggs was almost completely in the clear as far as Brenda Sorby’s death was concerned, and he didn’t see the young man as a psychopathic mass murderer. But the obvious has got to be seen to be done.

When he was bold enough to utter these thoughts to Dalziel, the fat man grunted, ‘Oh aye?’

A policewoman had been sent to tell Rosetta Stanhope the tragic news. Pascoe had steered her out of the office earlier that afternoon, with assurances that they would certainly consider her kind offer of psychic assistance.

Later he had been summoned to Dalziel’s office where the fat man was conferring with Detective Chief Inspector George Headingley who was in charge of the Spinks’ warehouse case. This was now murder. The watchman had died in hospital that morning, and Headingley was in search of more manpower. They had gone over the staff dispositions together and seen how tautly stretched they were. Then Pascoe had mentioned Rosetta Stanhope’s offer of help and frivously wondered if they might not take it up.

‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘She can try to make contact with the ACC for a start. That bugger’s been dead from the neck up for years!’

They had all laughed. And not long afterwards Wield had phoned with his news.

Now Pascoe awaited uneasily the arrival of the dead girl’s aunt. She would have to be taken to the mortuary for a formal identification of the body. It was always an unpleasant business, and though Rosetta Stanhope had impressed him as a strong-willed albeit rather eccentric character, experience had taught him there was no way of forecasting reactions.

He felt almost relieved when the policewoman called in with the news that Mrs Stanhope was not at home so she had stationed herself outside her flat to await her return.

Shortly afterwards Wield returned to say that Dave Lee had gone off in his van right after the sergeant’s visit. No one knew, or at least was telling, his destination.

Finally the DC sent to check on Tommy Maggs arrived, also unaccompanied. Maggs had not returned to work after the dinner break and there was no reply to repeated knockings at the door of his home.

‘Check with the neighbours,’ ordered Dalziel. ‘See if he’s contacted his parents at work. Find out who his doctor is. Sergeant Wield, you’ve got Lee’s van number? Right. Put out a call. Peter, you go and deal with the press, will you? You’re better at shooting shit than anyone else.’

‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘What do I tell them?’

‘What you know, which, unless you’re holding something back, is bugger all.’

‘They’ll be keen to know if it’s the Choker again,’ said Pascoe.

‘Won’t know that till the PM. And then we’ll only know it’s a Choker!’

‘It looks a pretty clear case,’ protested Pascoe. ‘I mean, compared with the Sorby girl …’

‘You think so? We’ll have to see,’ said Dalziel.

The old bastard thinks he’s on to something, thought Pascoe. Or perhaps he just likes being contrary.

The journalists who had gathered at the fairground were not just local. Word had spread, and there were even a couple from London already, though it emerged that they had travelled up attracted by the clairvoyance story, and Pauline Stanhope’s murder was just a bonus. In the car park, a television crew were unshipping their cameras. They would get some good atmospheric footage if nothing more, thought Pascoe. The fairground amusements, after a brief hiatus, were back to full steam, whirling, glittering, blaring. Did the laughter, the music, the excited shrieking hold perhaps a more than usually strident note of hysteria? wondered Pascoe. It was almost indecent, but at the same time it was inevitable. Death, the biggest barker of them all, had gathered together a huge crowd and the fair people could hardly be expected to ignore this opportunity. It wasn’t even as if Pauline Stanhope was one of their own. Nor Rosetta, for that matter. Once a year they joined the show while the rest of them formed a shifting but constant community.

He stonewalled the questions for ten minutes. As he’d anticipated, they were most eager for confirmation that this was a Choker killing.

‘What about the Hamlet calls, Inspector?’ asked one of the reporters. ‘Has there been one yet?’

‘I don’t know.’ Pascoe smiled. ‘You’d better ask your colleague from the Evening Post. His boss gets them first.’

One of the TV men caught his sleeve as he turned away and asked if they could do a filmed interview in about five minutes.

‘I’ll have to check,’ said Pascoe.

‘Well, it’s not with you, actually. It’s Superintendent Dalziel we’d like.’

Piqued, Pascoe returned to the caravan where he found Dalziel on the phone which the Post Office had just connected.

‘The telly men request the pleasure of your company, sir,’ he said when the fat man had finished.

‘What’s up with you, lad? Not photogenic?’

‘Perhaps I don’t fill a twenty-six-inch screen,’ said Pascoe acidly.

‘What? Put you out, has it, lad?’ chortled Dalziel. ‘Here’s something to put you back in. I’ve just been talking to Sammy Locke at the Post.’

‘There’s been a call?’ said Pascoe eagerly.

‘I knew that’d please you, Peter. You reckon you’ll get the bugger through these calls, don’t you? Well, best of luck. There’s two of the sods at it now!’

He was wrong.

By the time Pascoe got home that night there’d been four Hamlet calls.

The first, at four-forty-two, said, Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.

The second, at five-twenty-three, said, One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

The third, at six-fifteen, said, To be, or not to be, that is the question.

The fourth, at seven-nine, said, The time is out of joint: – O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.

Ellie, for a change, was in bright good spirits and Pascoe was so pleased to see this that he restricted himself to no more than a forty degree roll of the eyeballs when she announced that she was now the membership secretary of WRAG. In any case, she seemed much more keen to talk about the Choker.

‘These phone calls. Are they really going to be any use?’

‘We don’t have much else,’ said Pascoe, tucking into his re-heated beef and mushroom pie. ‘But they can’t all be the Choker. Sammy Locke’s memory of the first voice is a bit vague. He reckons that two, possibly three, of this lot are not so very different from it.’

‘You’ve got all today’s calls on tape, you say,’ said Ellie. ‘What you want is a language expert to listen to them.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Pascoe, who’d already made the suggestion to Dalziel but wasn’t about to be a clever-sticks. ‘Anyone in mind?’

‘Well, there’s Dicky Gladmann and Drew Urquhart at the College. They impress their students by working out regional and social backgrounds by voice analysis.’

‘And are they right?’

‘One hundred per cent usually, I gather. But I think they probably check the records first. Still, they’re certainly incomprehensible enough to be good linguists.’

Pascoe finished his pie, drew breath and started in on the apple crumble, also warmed up.

She wants me to get fat too! he suddenly thought.

‘I’ll give them a try. Though they’re probably enjoying their little vacation in Acapulco,’ he said. ‘By the way, you never said, how did la Lacewing respond to your theory about the medium message?’

‘Thought it was a load of crap,’ said Ellie moodily.

‘Did she now? Well well. Let me have the transcript back, won’t you?’

‘Yes. And she got pretty close to embarrassing me by talking about you being in charge of the case.’

‘That embarrasses you?’

‘Of course not. No, I mean she was trying to put down some loud-mouthed, fellow called Middlefield, he’s a JP or something, thinks all murdered women are ipso facto whores. I tell you what was interesting, though. I gathered the fellow he was talking to was the manager of the bank where that other girl worked. The one on the tape. Or not.’

‘Brenda Sorby. Now that is interesting,’ said Pascoe.

Later as they lay in bed, Ellie said drowsily. ‘This poor woman at the fairground. You say she was Rosetta Stanhope’s niece?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then maybe she’ll get in touch with her. I mean, they must have been close.’

‘Maybe,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ll call you in if it happens.’

She dug her elbow in his ribs and soon her breath steadied into the regularity of sleep.

Pascoe found sleep difficult, however, and when it did come, it came in fits and starts and flowed shallowly over a rocky bed. Ellie was partly responsible by putting the thought of Pauline Stanhope into his mind, but she would have been there anyway. He always slept badly the night before attending a post-mortem and tomorrow he was due at the City Mortuary at nine A.M. to attend the last forensic rites on the body of Pauline Stanhope.

Chapter 8

The police pathologist was a swift, economical worker who never took refuge in the kind of ghoulish heartiness with which some of his colleagues sought to make their jobs tolerable. Pascoe was glad of this. He liked to enter an almost trance-like state of professional objectivity on these occasions and had already offended the Mortuary Superintendent and the nervous new Coroner’s Officer by his brusque response to their efforts at socialization.

The pathologist examined the neck first before asking the Superintendent to remove the clothes which were then separately packaged and sent on their way to the laboratory. After a further careful examination of the naked body, turning it over on the slab so that nothing was missed, the pathologist was ready to make the median incision. As the scalpel slipped through the white skin, the Coroner’s Officer swayed slightly. This was his first time, Pascoe had gathered from the man’s nervy conversation with the Mortuary Superintendent. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a notebook, and tapped the man on the shoulder.

‘Borrow your pen a moment?’ he asked brusquely.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the man.

Pascoe scribbled a few notes, then returned the implement.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’d better have it back. Your need’s greater than mine. Your boss is a stickler for detail in all these forms, isn’t he?’

The man managed a pale grin, then began writing at a furious rate.

After a while Pascoe took his own pen from his pocket and followed suit.

There was another disturbance, more obvious this time, about thirty minutes later.

Voices were heard distantly upraised. After a while the door opened and a porter came in and spoke quietly to the Mortuary Superintendent who relayed the information to Pascoe.

‘There’s a woman outside with a man. She says she’s the girl’s aunt and she’s making a fuss about seeing the body.’

Pascoe looked at the cadaver on the examination table. The sternum and frontal ribs had been removed and the omentum cut away so that heart, lungs and intestine were visible.

The pathologist continued with his work, undisturbed by the interruption.

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